A swordish wife

 Bunna has an avant-garde, sharp-edged wife. He has been a withdrawn youth but at last fate has feted him with an instrument to beat his brooding self trapped inside a recalcitrant persona. He is safely drafted into matrimony, having hit the jackpot to get a wife at last. There is no scope for any sort of discontentment now as long as there is a wife. So now as a young man, looking for the satiation of the customary desire, he easily gets what he needs at this stage of life. These are bewitching days suffused with enchantment of flesh. Life seems a cakewalk with varied compilation of the much-touted sense pleasure; a kind of true-to-life tenderness blooming like lotus among the mud of tyranny and suffocation.

Mostly all relationships carry love-hate shades. Apart from the usual recreations and raptures, his wife’s requirements but cover a broader horizon. She is very quick to hit the belligerent trajectory. She sandblasts her husband, so much so that hers is a legend-spinning persona in the neighborhood. Although evocative and vivid in her fun-games with her husband, she scratches his face and spits at him when she suffers from the fits of her volcanic temper.

He is receptive to all this with a wobbly cuteness. He carries an ironic, wispy half-smile. As she gallantly takes a crushing grip at the last traces of his freedom, he coolly bears all this, knowing fully well that this is the investment he has to commit in lieu of all that he needs. In fact, he considers himself lucky to have a wife. He is the only one fortunate enough to get a wife among three brothers. He is wise and understands that if he reacts, on the spur of an anarchist moment, his grip on matrimonial pleasure may be gone with an extraordinary twinkle. So he is joyously yoked into the affair with a womanly compliance. I find him pretty strong willed in this, a sort of strong-charactered guy who is compellingly consistent in his demeanor. 

He works in a needle-making factory. It’s a very careful work where you cannot afford to be in estrangement with caution even for a moment. In this way, he is completely used to needling by his perk, petite, curvaceous, young, temperamental wife. On a Sunday, he lets his guard slightly down. It’s late morning. He takes few pegs of the cheap desi liquor, offering one to his razor-sharp wife also. A romantic Bollywood song then shatters the neighborhood walls. It’s eroticizing and exoticizing romance beyond limits. The exquisite lyrics carry their sensuous notes with incorrigible loudness. The locality’s peace lies in shambles, almost in disrepair.

The frivolous notes sneak into serious corners. Someone is in the middle of an online examination going. Bunna and his sharp wife are caught in dulled, gyrating moments, as a prelude to their tumbling fight in the bed, by the complainant who arrives at the door of their small upstairs room in their tiny house. This is a clear KLPD. Her romantic energies then change to vendetta against her husband. He is sympathetic to the complaint raised by the neighbor and hence lowers the volume. Now the sizzling energies in the razor-sharp wife need an escape medium. She pounces upon her husband calling him a floundering sissy and coward who pees at the instructions of ever-exploiting neighbors. The volume of sound stays the same, as loud as earlier, just that now it’s the wife raising a storm.

A child's playmate

 Nevaan has turned a caustic interrogator now. With his little steps liberating him from childhood dependencies, he is nicely climbing up the teasing scaffolding of boyhood to further enlarge his sphere of influence. As I use the toilet, he stands outside the door and sternly asks, ‘Mama kya kar rahe ho?’ There is a weird nuance in his tone. He sounds like a policeman in this enquiry. ‘What will a person do in the loo?’ I mutter guardedly like an irritated thief in the jail. My tone is rudely soured for being asked such an obvious question. Now, they are smartphone-honed, extra-smart generation. They are discerning and insightful beyond their years. Before we realize they have already acquired critical perspectives. God forbid, if he already—just at the age of five—has some idea about the other side of the story that sometimes unfolds inside loos and bathrooms. If it’s so then it’s quite worrisome.

There is a dry, crooked branch of tree lying in a corner in the yard. With a cynical certainty, it becomes a sword, a gun, a stick, a spear, a policeman’s baton as per the role adopted by him. In all these instances, it’s a super-hero’s weapon of dispensing justice against the evil, the bad guy. No need to guess, I’m the all-bad guy, thoroughly enmeshed with thuggery, who needs a child’s weapon to mend his errant ways. My primary crime is asking him not to watch too much of cartoon programs on television. So there he is on a mission to reframe my persona into someone who is comfortable with children watching cartoon programs on television for endless hours. You can say he wants to mold me into a good guy. 

Consciousness dancing on the floor of its self-hatched realities

 How will a stone know that it's a stone? It knows how to 'be' a stone, that's why it exists. From the tiniest to the biggest, from the moving to the unmoving, from dust to a flower, everything knows how to 'be'. In fact, the things considered as insentient by us know it perfectly well how to 'be'. The atomic arrangement in them knows how to be a stone. But there is a tendency in the element of just 'being so' to 'become something' and that drives this multilayered flux from being to becoming ranging from galaxies to a dew drop. At their essential core, 'just being so' and 'becoming something' are part of the same game. In fact the same thing. A stone looks just a stone, but it's becoming something as well at the same time. The process is very subtle. And what is consciousness? This is the force of 'being' and 'becoming' itself. The debate is endless and the question will stay unresolved till eternity as long as we are compartmentalizing matter, energy and consciousness as separate entities. That's a very funny convenience we create. But what else is this existence apart from the limitless potential to create? Mother creation is just an open ended freeway of timeless and spaceless possibilities. 

Coming back to consciousness. If you segregate one fundamental entity into three different categories, like here in matter, energy and consciousness, you have infinite possibilities to create logic, analysis, hypothesis or any other output of mindwork. That's our logical creation only. It hardly deals with the essential commonality between matter, energy and consciousness. It but serves a purpose. This categorization of the same unity into fragmented elements gives rise to fabulous brainwork in the form of science, religion, ethics, moral codes, education, culture, everything belonging to the blissful and agonizing maya we create. Who can stop little children from making castles, dolls, dogs, toys, sepoys from the same mud and clay? They are free to play and take it very seriously to believe their creations to be quite different from each other. But does that make any difference to the mud being just mud? The entire profession of consciousness scientists will turn redundant the moment we put up the little toys of energy, matter and consciousness into the dustbin and mesh them together to make them the undifferentiated clay.

This creation, this game, this play of energy, this churning of matter, this storm of consciousness is helpless in 'being' and 'becoming'. It goes on. And all of us are entitled to erect smart structures of nations, religions, gods, deities, science, cars, planes, relationships, smiles, tears, everything. So keep 'becoming' all you 'beings'. And once you 'become', again try just to 'be'. It keeps us busy like every particle around us madly busy in spinning. All this is just a tiny storm in the teacup, a little ripple in a tiny corner of the universe or multiverse whatever you name it. And this play and expansion is so funny as to take itself very very seriously and churn out wonders, new shapes and phenomena at every point of its expansion. But all this is the same primordial dust playing with itself making different looking entities. Consciousness trying to be conscious of itself. A sort of self-driving motive for its journey,  a never-ending journey. If you are trying to be conscious of something outside yourself, the journey can't be endless and later or sooner you will stop. But here consciousness is following its own tail, trying to be conscious of itself, like a cat chasing its tail in a circle, unleashing a blizzard of happenings. And that creates newer and newer avenues for latest versions. I hope you remember the ancestors of little house lizards were once mighty dinosaurs. Infinity trying to be limited and make a meaning of its meaninglessness through laws and generalization. And we carry the same tendency of the cosmic entity's fundamental quest. We are a little ounce of universe chasing its tail, spinning on its axis to find some meaning for all this spinning around. From the so called best to the worst, we finally convince ourselves that that's the real meaning. But that again is a solace, a conditioning of our mind to accept something that seems to give us some respite from the mad circling around in pursuance of our own tails. Whatever meaning you create, whatever toy you make, it hardly matters to the primordial clay. But yes, the clays that we create through individual and collective organizational set up in the form of nations, organizations, religion, faith, gods, deities, bureaucracy everything, that's merely an acceptance, an agreement to behold the validity of our creation. It has no bearing on the fundamental mud and clay, the cosmic pool of consciousness, we are all wallowing in. I have repeatedly used the word 'consciousness' because we have all agreed to define it as such. So spin your webs well. Create your realities. Dance on the floor quite energetically. Contort yourself in your dancing as much as you want, move and shake in your own weird ways. Only caution, try not to trample others toes as you go dancing. 

During the dynamic meditation sessions at an Osho ashram, people would let loose their inner emotions through crying, laughing, rolling on the floor, shouting or singing. Some would roar like lions and I would be scared that they might bury their molars in someone's throat. I was particularly scared for one old tauji who usually turned into the cutest goat after every dynamic meditation session. He would crawl on all fours and move around bleating. That was when I got apprehensive that the lions in the group might pounce upon him for their dinner. Jokes apart, the cute goaty tauji had every right to become a goat as long as he took care of not trotting out of the hall and enter the garden for grazing on well-tendered flowers. 

A layman's skirmish with mantra sadhna

Father could read write and speak English as if he was a professor of English in some English-speaking country. A wonderstruck group of white tourists had given him the certificate of English proficiency like this: ‘Sir, you know and speak English better than our professors!’ So that is a kind of indication of his mastery in the field. He worked as a middle-level governmental employee in the Life Incorporation of India (LIC) and spent most of his working years at the LIC headquarters at Connaught Place in Delhi. He commuted daily by train to office. So his was a day stretched in contrasts—the day at the most cosmopolitan spot in India and the night at the most rustic village. During the weekends he simple read books. He provided the money for the upkeep and Mother carried the domestic cart on her strong peasant woman shoulders. She did the household chores, took care of the cattle in the barn and managed farming as well. Father looked a saintly man, somewhat a worldly hybrid—in looks at least—among Swami Ramakrishna, Shirdi Sainath and Maharishi Raman—and wore plain kurta-pyjama. So when one day when he was in full form giving a lecture in English to some young college students in the train on the way to office, a disbelieving farmer nudged at his neighbor and exclaimed, ‘This man is haunted by the ghost of an Englishman!’ Father heard it and from then on it became his identity in the family.

Well, I inherited his skills to a partial extent and the little group of villages in the countryside declared me to be the most suitable candidate to crack Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination, the gateway to the most powerful bureaucratic positions in the country. So naturally I found myself preparing for the corridors of power. I was the darling of the entire village’s eyes. They wanted me to become a big magistrate or commissioner to have a part in ‘power game’ so that they would have someone from the village to protect them when there were traffic challans, family feuds, drunken fights, bloody skirmishes over lands, etc. A few drunkards in the village were sure that life would be a cakewalk for them once I became a bada sahib and they would stay at my official quarters. One particular liquor-lover, whom I had seen falling from his bicycle many times, already appointed himself as my future official driver once I became a district magistrate.

These days the Indian Civil Services exam has been pared to test majorly the attitudional smartness of the candidates. But during our days it was a behemoth of syllabus literally covering everything on earth. The exam went through the year across various stages requiring one to be buried in tomes of books. There were so many books as would fill up a decent-sized room to the ceilings across its full dimensions. So that was a tapasya. It was just studies, studies and studies. It was just like a yogi buried in tapasya in his cave. For seven long years I was in day-night studies and hardly remember anything else from my youth.

I came very near to fulfill the dreams of my father and the entire village. I had cleared two stages of written exams and the final interview remained, the all-important half hour that could undo the entire year’s labor. I had scored very high in the written test, as I would come to know later in the final marksheet. If things would have gone even averagely good, given my high written score, I might have been selected for the most coveted diplomatic corps, the group of elite officers who represent the country as ambassadors. But the higher forces! My brain went numb during that half hour. Something pushed the talk into the zone of negativity, non-confidence and arguments. I received the least possible marks in the interview to be summarily rejected. I had four chances, so for four years I futilely ran into the wall only to be recoiled into failure.

The villagers hadn’t yet lost their faith in me. The second most coveted bureaucratic posts at the provincial level (Provincial Civil Services—PCS) were still available to fight for. So my next three years were spent in this tapasya. Once you have cleared the ICS exam, clearing the PCS is very easy, so I was clearing the PCS exams pretty easily. But selection to the PCS involved lots of tests, not strictly falling in the zone of examination and personality test. One had to, at least till then, clear the written exam with very high score and for facilitation in the minutes-long personality test one had to either own a few sackfuls of currency as well as political recommendation from the highest political elements. I had none. So as it would happen, I would score very high marks in the written part but would be shown the way out in the interview, which used to be a gross mockery, a mere formality for manipulation, during those times.

That is when the element of faith entered in my life. I had realized that certain forces, bigger than any of my effort and academic capabilities, were stonewalling my efforts. And only faith in powerful deities can break those walls. There was this very famous astrologer who boasted about a certain mantra sadhna. He proclaimed that if done by serious students he/she can easily enter the astrological chart of raja yoga, that’s a sharer in ‘power’ in the most coveted positions. It involved 125 thousand chantings of a mantra after taking the sankalp of that goal to be achieved. The mantra I would keep secret for its sanctity. It was in worship of Ma Tulsi, holy basil, the sacred plant, a representative of Ma Lakshmi. The ritual involved getting Ma Tusli and Saligram (a phallic representative of Lord Vishnu) married with a mauli thread tied for their sacred union and chanting the mantra 125 thousand times with a Tulsi mala in hand. Now please read carefully about my sankalp, my purported blessing from the sacred plant in lieu of my mantra sadhna. ‘Hey Ma please get me selected to the HCS,’ I sought the blessing in this literary presentation. It meant, O Mother Tulsi please get me selected to the HCS. Here HCS stands for the Haryana Civil Services. They become additional commissioners and sub-divisional magistrates, a step down from the all-powerful ICS.

My mantra sadhna started. It was rainy season. I had set-up the divine union between Ma Tusli and Holy Saligram in our garden and would daily chant the mantra, just lips moving and the mantra vibrating across my being, holding the Tulsi mala in hand, eyes closed, a butter lamp and incense burning in front of the deities, rolling my fingers over Tulsi beads. I would daily perform the mantra sadhna for three-four hours for about a month to complete the count of 125 thousand mantra japs. In between I got one of the worst malaria bouts of my life because there were mosquitos, it being the rainy season. My condition was really bad but I kept the schedule and chanted while lying flat in front of the little instrument of my faith for those two days when my weakness didn’t allow me to sit. But thankfully I was successful in completing the task. The mantra sadhna was complete.

The next attempt brought miracles. I was selected. Finally. So much for Mother’s blessings. To be selected for a post for which, even then, people would offer 50 lakh rupees in corruption money, for which a recommendation nothing short of a state’s Chief Minister’s direct recommendation would do the trick, me, a simple guy without that much money and that big political recommendation, was a miracle. Somehow things had taken a course as to facilitate me through the hitherto unsurpassable hurdles. The group of villages went into celebration. They would finally have a magistrate to shift little battles in their favor. I would always give extra affection to those whom others spurned, so the much-maligned liquor-lovers declared that now their woes are over, they would live with their dear magistrate.

I had asked to be blessed with an ‘HCS selection’ and with the punya of my mantra sadhna I had got ‘selected’. However, a massive ‘but’ remained. Destiny still chuckled with glee and anticipation over the futile efforts of its puppet.

Now I share the most important part in the game of mantra sadhna. You must have read stories about demons doing hard tapasya, doing rigorous sadhnas for a blessing by the devtas. The devtas would finally appear and ask them for a blessing. Now a little-brained, with loads of muscles though, a rakshasha would blurt like a child and ask for the boon, foolishly wording it in a way that it left a big loophole for their own undoing even with the Godly blessing. I had done the same. I had demanded to be ‘selected to the HCS’ and Ma Tusli blessed me with a ‘selection’ in lieu of my mantra sadhna. I thought that was all that was required to change one’s destiny. But there was more to it. There is a big difference between getting ‘selected for the HCS’ and ‘becoming a HCS’. Then the unthinkable happened. It happened for the first time in independent Indian history that a duly selected PCS officers batch was denied appointment. Mother’s boon ended at getting me ‘selected’. In my folly I hadn’t insisted on ‘becoming an HCS officer’. I thought both are same because till then getting ‘selected’ was synonymous with ‘becoming’. So sometimes Gods would take help of linguistic loopholes to still have their say despite all of your efforts.

The batch got into political controversies between rival chief ministerial candidates fighting an internecine battle for power. And it was messed up. The case is still gasping with feeble breaths in the courtrooms even after 18 years. During this time I have seen the grossest of misuse of power by judges and powerful politicians. There were sometimes very shiny days in between when all were assured that finally justice would be done but it would soon get undone by a sudden squall of unexplained events that would again cast gloomy shadow on the case. I can report all those mysterious, sudden events but it would take several pages. Anyway, of that sometimes later. I’m still involved in the litigation, not for power or pelf. What do they matter now? But it’s just out of habit maybe, or possible an inclination to stick to the concept of justice. It just draws me sometimes to keep the case alive.

I don’t blame corrupt judges and powerful politicians for the episode. They are mere puppets in the bigger game unfolding around. If at all there are some lacunae, they are there in the wording of my seeking blessing in lieu of my mantra sadhna. Like a cute little demon, seeking boons and blessing in return for tapasya, I left a linguistic loophole which allowed destiny to fulfill my wishes as well as guard its own mysterious plan.

And I don’t have any complaints against Ma Tusli either. She knows better what is good for the child. Recently during the rainy season, I slipped horribly and landed like a log on the stone floor. I landed near a pot bearing holy Mother Tulsi. The fall was so hard as to leave me numb for many minutes. There was absolutely no pain or injury. Like a grounded child, rattled out of my senses, I looked at Ma Tusli. One of her branches was broken. Didn’t she receive me in her embrace like a kind mother and taking a looming fracture on her own? I haven’t removed that dry broken branch till now. It reminds me of what she has done for me. Then it becomes so easy to forget and walk over what wasn’t done.   

A rich boy's story of poverty

 The teacher asks a rich student in the class to write a story on poverty. The boy writes:

‘There was a very poor family. Their car driver was also very poor. The gardener, cook, and other servants in the house were also very poor. Their car was also not as good as those kept by the rich people in the city. The children couldn’t go to Europe for summer vacations like the rich people did. It was a very poor sad family.’

So this was the boy’s meaning of poverty. Well, all our individual truths are in fact mere funny judgments and opinions drawn from the relatively higher or comparatively lower reference points. And they will keep shifting. With more money in the said boy’s family, the definition of poverty will shift to a new point. The shifting facts can never hold real universal truth in their grasp. Debates, discussions based on shifting facts and varying truths will at the most give careers, business, one-upmanship but the universal truth stays hidden. It hasn’t any worldly reference. Its only reference is that it strictly isn’t in reference to whatever we perceive with ordinary sense perception.

What is the way out left then? The interesting web formed by these relative, referential, shifting truths—mere judgments and opinions in reality—is so seductive, so alluring. It seems so real.

Well, crawl through the web and go into saturation with the pursuits. If that gives you real joy then you already are a saint, somehow detached from all that engages you. But if you feel the restlessness and meaninglessness of all this then start filtering out. Neti, neti…not this, not this. With your experiential realization you will walk through the clutter and see the charming futility of all this. Maybe then the self-sustaining, self-standing, immovable eternal truth will grace you with the profoundest meaning of all this meaninglessness exploding around.